Showing papers by "Dong Jun Seo published in 2009"

Characteristics of Reprocessed Hydrometeorological Automated Data System (HADS) Hourly Precipitation Data

Abstract: The Hydrometeorological Automated Data System (HADS) is a real-time data acquisition, processing, and distribution system operated by the Office of Hydrologic Development (OHD) of NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS). The initial reprocessing of HADS data from its original format since its inception in July 1996 has been completed at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). The quality of the reprocessed HADS hourly precipitation data from rain gauges is assessed by two objective metrics: the average fraction of missing values and the percentage of top-of-the-hour observations for a 3-yr period (2003‐05). Pairwise comparisons between the reprocessed product and the real-time product are made using representative samples (about 13%) from the 48 contiguous United States. The monthly average of missing values varies from 0.5% to 2% in the reprocessed product and from 1.7% to 10.1% in the real-time product. Except for January2003,thereprocessedproductconsistently reducedmissingvalues,by asmuch as9.4%in October 2004.Theavailabilityof top-of-the-hourobservations is about85%in thereprocessedproduct,whiletherealtime product has top-of-the-hour observations only about 50% of the time. This paper discusses real-time product quality issues, additional quality assurance algorithms used in the reprocessing environment, and the design of system-wide performance comparisons. Thus, the benefits to users of reprocessing the HADS data are the correction of 4-h observation time errors during 1 July‐11 August 2005 and the demonstration of diurnalspatternofprecipitationfrequenciesinregionaldomains.AWeb-basedinteractivequalityassessment tool for reprocessed HADS hourly precipitation data and access to the data are also presented.